Year: 2018

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21    

Ash Wednesday

 

It’s been 73 years since Ash Wednesday fell on Valentine’s Day. Valentine’s Day is a lot more fun when it falls on Mardi Gras, which is always the day before Ash Wednesday.  But today is Valentine’s Day, and Ash Wednesday. Chocolates and champagne, or ashes on your forehead?  Do you want to hear “I love you,” or hear “you’re going to die.”?  As my husband likes to say, when given a choice, take both.  We might as well, for this is what God gives us this year, “I love you; you’re going to die.”

Most of us don’t like to be reminded that we are going to die.  But I know that there are at least 84 people who do.  That’s the number of people who have downloaded the app, “WeCroak.”[1] (You just can’t make this stuff up, or at least I can’t.) At unpredictable times, just like death, you are sent notices that read, “Don’t forget.  You’re going to die,” or “The grave has no sunny corners.” These are the less graphic of the notices.  According to the app developers, the program is meant to encourage contemplation, and meditation.  It is supposed to promote calm. (This explains why only 84 people downloaded it!)  The concept for it was inspired by a folk saying that in order to be happy, one must contemplate death five times a day.  What better way than to have your phone remind you?

The ashes imposed on our foreheads tonight will remind us that we are going to die.  Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.  It’s a reminder that God made us out of perishable stuff.  One of the creation stories in the book of Genesis tells us, Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostril the breath of life; and the man became a living being (Genesis 2:7).  That God made us is what gives us holiness.  It’s the perishable stuff, our bodies, that get us in to trouble. We are both saint and sinner, and while we have difficulty holding these two things together, God does not. Tonight, God says to us, “I love you.”  Tonight, God reminds us, “You’re going to die.”

God shows God’s love for us in and through his son, Jesus, who lived among us proclaiming that love through teaching, and healing and forgiveness. We killed him for it.  These forty days of Lent that begin tonight will lead us to Jesus’ death on a cross before we get to the glory of Christ’s resurrection.  Tonight, we will be marked with the cross of Christ in the form of ashes.  Just as we do not want to be reminded of our death, we do not want to face our sin.  It’s hard and uncomfortable to examine all the ways we fall short.  Tonight, we come head on with both.

I think it is the honesty of Ash Wednesday that makes it my favorite liturgical day.  These forty days of Lent begin with our confessing to God, to each other, and to the whole company of heaven that we have sinned by our own most grievous fault. While God loves us with God’s whole heart, we confess that we have not loved God with ours.  We have given our hearts to things that cannot love us back, like money, or social status, or pride.  Our values and our measures of success are not quite in line with God’s.

Even when we do things that God would have us do, such as give money to the poor, or pray, or fast, Matthew reminds us that we have a propensity to do so for the wrong reasons. That’s why Matthew tells us not to let the right hand know what the left hand is doing.   We look for praise and honor and love not from God, but from each other.  We are like children yelling, “Watch me!  Watch me!”  Our desire to be noticed is the result of sin. Jesus tells his disciple, “Do not be like the hypocrites.” The word “hypocrites” literally means “performers.”

This evening, we, with Christ, begin our journey to the cross, before we continue on to the resurrection.  Listen again to part of our Invitation to Lent:  We begin this holy season by acknowledging our need for repentance and for God’s mercy.  Do you hear the hope in our invitation?  We begin.  We start. Tonight is our chance to come clean, to die to our sin, and to begin again.  By admitting our sins, we become open to God’s working in us.  Being loved by God, and accepting God’s love, we are set free.  We are free from having to win, and from having to prove ourselves lovable.  We are free from needing the approval and admiration of others.  And if we are free from, we are free to.  We are free to focus on helping others.  We are free to love those who are not like us.  We are free to forgive.  We are free to become who God created us to be. We are free to dance without fear that someone will see us.

Tonight, we will receive ashes in the form of a cross, while hearing the words, “Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”  The marking of the ashen cross is placed on top of the cross made on our foreheads at our baptism.  Before we are reminded that we are going to die, we are marked with the cross of baptism, in which God claims us as his beloved. There is nothing that can change that, even our refusal to love God with our whole hearts.  As St. Paul tells us in his letter to the Romans, neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:38-39).  On this Valentine’s Ash Wednesday, God reminds us, I love you, and even your sin won’t change that.  You’re going to die. But even death won’t tear you out of my arms.

~ Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] Bosker, Bianca.  “The App That Reminds You You’re Going to Die.”  Technology.  January/February 2018.  Accessed on the web.

Mark 9:2-9     Transfiguration

Do you remember the movie, “Bruce Almighty”?   God gave Bruce some god-like powers.  One of the ways he abused these powers was to lasso the moon, and drew it closer to the earth so that his girlfriend would stand in awe looking at it, and fall more deeply in love with him.  Even the oceans desire to come closer to the moon, drawing up to it in waves over and over again.  The fact is that the moon does at times come closer to the earth than at others.  When a full moon is at a point in its orbit at which it is nearest to the earth, it appears 14% larger and 30% brighter than it usually does.  This is called a “Supermoon,” and we were blessed this year to have had three of them. Did you see one of the trinity?  Were you captured by its glorious, bright fullness against the dark night sky?   The contrast of the light and the dark enable us to see the fullness of both.

Light figures prominently in our reading and our liturgy. Today is Transfiguration Sunday, the conclusion of Epiphany.  “Six days later,” we read, “Jesus took with him Peter and James and John, and led them up a high mountain apart, by themselves.”  Six days ago, Jesus had told his disciples that he would go through tremendous suffering, and that the elders, chief priests and scribes would reject him.  He told the people that he would be killed.  He said that he then would be raised in three days.  Not understanding, Peter rebuked Jesus.  “Get behind me, Satan,” Jesus responded to him.

Now, almost a week later, Jesus took Peter with him, and James and John, too.  The four of them trekked up the mountain.  When they reached the summit, Jesus’ appearance changed.  His clothes became dazzling white, even brighter than new improved Tide could make them.  Jesus was transfigured right in front of their eyes. The disciples saw this man, the one they thought they knew in a different light.  He suddenly was more.  Just as the moon reflects the light of the sun, Jesus reflected the light of God. What an odd contradiction that the brighter Jesus appeared, the less clearly the disciples saw him.  Seeing Jesus as both divine and human was confusing.

Then Moses and Elijah appeared.  With these heroes of the faith, representing the law and the prophets, we are connected to God’s story.  Moses and Elijah  were not dazzling in appearance as Jesus was.  God bless Peter, who in his characteristic exuberant misunderstanding, blurted out, “Let’s make three dwellings, one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for you. Let’s stay here forever, right on top of this mountain.”   Maybe he thought that if they stayed on the mountain, Jesus would not have to suffer and die.  They could live with this view from the top, where life was full of light, forever.

Just then, a voice came from out of the cloud that overshadowed them.  “This is my Son, the beloved.  Listen to him.”  With these words we are brought back to Jesus’ baptism when we hear  a voice came from heaven, saying, “You are my Son, the Beloved,” just as Jesus was coming up out of the water.  In our story today, on top of the mountain, Moses and Elijah were not there after God spoke out of the cloud.  Only Jesus remained, but Jesus was all they needed.

They could not, as Peter had hoped, stay up there on the mountain. They had to come down.  Isn’t that true for us, too?  We have moments when we think we are on top of the world.  These times of happy dancing feet don’t last.  Peter, James, and John returned to the ups and downs of their everyday lives.  They came back to a place where people get sick, and hearts break.  They returned to where babies are born, and people die.  The good news is that Jesus came down with his disciples to the place that holds both elation and despair, moments of excruciating pain and deep happiness. The Jesus who was at the top of the mountain was also with them in the valley.

But even though we come back to our ordinary lives, we are different. We cannot be bathed in the light of Christ and stay the same.  The light of Christ illuminates the shadows and exposes the lies the world tells us, and the ones we tell ourselves.  These perpetuated untruths are things such as we are sufficient unto ourselves, and what happens to people we don’t know does not impact us.  These beliefs are part of what the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr terms “the False Self.”  He explains, “Your False Self is your necessary warm-up act, the ego part of you that establishes your separate identity…”[1]  Our False Self contains the qualities for which we strive to prove our worth, like being smart or rich or popular.  We end up using the same criteria to judge others worthiness.  Our False Self keeps us entering fully into a relationship with God.  Our True Selves recognize God’s presence not just with us, but with others.

When Jesus went back down the mountain, to walk with us in our sinfulness, he reminded his disciples that he would die, and be risen from the dead. Through the cross, Jesus chooses to show God’s love for us. In our baptisms, God joins us to Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection.  “Every time you choose to love,” Father Rohr writes, “you have also chosen to die.  Every time you truly love, you are letting go of yourself as an autonomous unit and have given a bit of yourself away to something else… ”[2]

As Jesus was transfigured through God’s light, we are transformed and called through Christ. We are called to love others as God loves us.  And, I know this is really hard for Lutherans, we are called to tell them that God loves them, that Christ died for them, and we are to speak the words out loud.

The moon is about 238,855 miles away, and yet we see its light shining on all the earth.  The light of Christ is closer.  Can you see it?  Christ is as close as the baptismal waters, and the wine and bread.  Christ is close enough to touch in the passing of the peace, and hear in the reading of the scripture.  How can we come this close and not be changed?

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] Rohr, Richard.  The Immortal Diamond. San Francisco:  Jossey-Bass, 2013. 64. Our True Selves recognize God’s presence not just with us, but with others.

[2] Ibid., 65.

Mark 1:21-28     Epiphany 4

Possessed by demons.  What image does this create for you when you hear that?  I think I am safe in saying that for many of us, the movie The Exorcist was both moving and terrifying.  We watched Linda Blair’s character, Regan, as she turned from a sweet little girl into a murderous creature.  Can you still picture Regan sitting up on the bed, her head spinning 360 degrees, something like split pea soup violently spews out of her mouth, drenching those who are standing in the room?  As Father Merrin and the young priest Father Karrass perform an exorcism, the older priest’s heart gives out and he dies.  Father Karrass becomes enraged.  He then begs the demon, “Take me!  Take me!”   For the brief period that the priest and the demon are together in the same body, the young man throws himself out the window, thereby killing both himself and the demon.   But this is just a story, isn’t it?  Enlightened people of the twenty-first century are not possessed by demons.  Are they?

It is interesting to me that the writer of Mark chooses to present an exorcism as Jesus’ first act of public ministry.  In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus first public ministry is his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.  In the Gospel of Luke, it was Jesus’ preaching in his hometown, which offended people, as we know preachers often do.  In the Gospel of John, it was the wedding at Cana, in which Jesus turned water into fine wine, that began Jesus’ ministry to the people.  But in our gospel of Mark, Jesus’ first public act is one of that begins with controversy and confrontation.

The controversy begins because Jesus was teaching in the synagogue on the Sabbath. A man with an unclean spirit was suddenly there.  Maybe he was there all along, but no one interacted with him. Why didn’t anyone notice him? Had he been here before?  Whose seat was he sitting in?  Eyes glared when he stood up, and gasps were heard when he cried out loud, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”  It’s a good question.  “Have you come to destroy us?  I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”  “Be silent!” Jesus commanded, “and come out of him.”  The demon did, but not without first crying and shouting and convulsing.  Demons always try to resist God.

I’ve come to treasure Mark’s perspective of Jesus’ initial ministry.  In his first public act, Jesus looks at this being, and sees the unclean spirit.  But Jesus sees more than that.  Jesus sees the person, too.  And this broken human being, who does not seek and has not asked for it, receives healing anyway.  Jesus restores this person to himself, and to his loved ones. Jesus heals him into wholeness, and this once demon possessed person becomes part of the community again.

Seeing the humanity in people is something that Jesus does so well.  He does that with lepers, and those who are blind, or cannot hear.  He sees the value in prostitutes and greedy tax collectors. Jesus sees into the souls of those possessed by the demons.  Truth be told, we all have demons. Our holiness and our un-holiness reside in the same body.  For some of us, it is addiction to drugs or alcohol.  The demons of addiction are many.  Some people are addicted to work, and some to praise, and some to shopping.  The demons that haunt us may be incidents of physical or emotional abuse.  Demons, the things that defy God, come in many sizes, shapes, and textures.

Our society today seems to have lost the ability to see past people’s demons, to find our commonality in the midst of our craziness.  We fail to see the humanity in the other, especially when we disagree with them.  And we have had a lot of disagreements recently.

Dr. Brene Brown, a research professor and author, spoke recently at the Washington National Cathedral.[1]  She observes that over the past twenty years, we have “sorted ourselves by our ideology into factions.”  We spend time with those who think like us, and we have no interest in being with those who don’t. There is a fascinating correlation to this.  The rates of loneliness have risen in proportion to our grouping ourselves with the like-minded.  The more sorted we become, the lonelier we become.

We think that being part of a group will make us not feel lonely, but we have no real connection with those whom we hang out. “We just hate the same people,” Dr. Brene Brown says.  She terms our relationships like this, “common enemy intimacy.” [2] We aren’t interested in getting to really know those who share our same dislikes.  We just want validation.

In his TED Talk, What Makes a Good Life, Robert Waldinger points to the on-going 75-year research project, the Harvard Study of Adult Development.[3]  The study reveals that one in five Americans report being lonely.  Both Waldinger and Brown cite the fact that loneliness kills, literally.  It is a better predictor of early death than our demons of obesity, smoking, or excessive drinking.  According to a UCLA study, loneliness diminishes our brain function, raises our blood pressure, contributes to cardiovascular disease, increases inflammation, and interferes with our sleep.[4]  Loneliness has become such an epidemic that the United Kingdom’s Parliament has appointed a Minister of Loneliness.

This is a “crisis of spiritual connection,” Brown has determined.  She defines spirituality as “the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to each other by something greater than us, something rooted in love and compassion.”[5]  We have forgotten this.  We failed to see the humanity in those who do think like us, or vote like us, or look like us.  When we dehumanize people, it is easy to treat them as if they do not matter, or even worse.

Dr. Brown asserts the answer lies in holding hands with strangers, and being in communion with people you don’t know, sharing moments of collective joy and pain.[6]  Healing happens when we sing together, and pray for people we have never met.  We are called to find the face of Jesus in the other.  Together, we who are possessed and broken come and gather around the altar.  In community, we come, bringing our demons with us, to receive again God’s love, forgiveness.  Together, our wounds will be healed in our sharing, in Jesus’ broken body and his poured-out blood, — the body and blood of Christ given and shed for us.  Christ does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  We are fed to go out into the world, looking for Jesus in others and being Jesus for them, too.

In his first act of ministry among the people, Jesus chooses to bring healing so that the person possessed with demons can be part of the community.  Our service of baptism, and affirmation of baptism are done in community.  In our profession of faith, the first question we are asked is, “Do you renounce the devil and all the forces that defy God?”  We promise to do so with God’s help.  We cannot do it without God, and Lord knows we cannot do it without each other.

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” the demons ask. Everything.  “Have you come to destroy us?”  Yes.

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

 

[1] https://cathedral.org/sermons/sermon-dr-brene-brown/  accessed January 27, 2018.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Robert Waldinger, What Makes a Life Good.  TED Talks, November 2015.

[4] https://www.thecut.com/2018/01/the-health-effects-of-loneliness.html.

[5] “Something greater than us” is not cats, even though the cats think so!

[6] https://cathedral.org/sermons/sermon-dr-brene-brown/  accessed January 27, 2018.

1 Samuel 3: 1-10, John 1:43-51          Epiphany 2

Hannah, in Biblical language, was barren.  She wanted a child so badly that she often wept uncontrollably. She stopped eating.  One day, at the Temple in Shiloh, she was crying so hard that her whole body shook. Her tears dripped down, drenching her dress.  With her lips moving in prayer, Hannah promised God that if God gave her a son, she would dedicate him to the Lord’s service.  Eli, the priest at Shiloh, saw her body and her lips moving, and concluded that she was drunk.  After they straightened out their misunderstanding, Eli blessed her prayer. Hannah bore a son, and she named him Samuel.

When Samuel was weaned, she brought him to live at the temple with Eli.  The days and years passed, and at the time of our story, Samuel had been sweeping the floors and locking the doors of the temple at night for about nine years. He had listened to the sounds of worship, and smelled the clashing scents of roasted sacrifices and of incense rising.  Now a young man of twelve, Samuel had spent virtually all his life watching the priests prepare the offerings and hearing them pray. He knew the days dedicated to repentance, and the celebrations of God’s rescue of his ancestors.

By the time of our story, Eli’s age had caught up with him. His eyes squinted to focus, and his ears strained to hear.  The night had just begun to fall, and Samuel was lying down in the Temple. The ark of the covenant, with the tablets containing God’s law, stood within his reach.  Eli was in the next room, in his own darkness.  Every time he rolled over, his joints groaned from wear.  He chased thoughts of his sons, Phineas and Hophni, away.  They had been abusing their priestly privileges, demanding the best meat for themselves instead of sacrificing it to God.  They were corrupt and worthless.  They dishonored God and the temple.  It was easier for Eli to pretend not to know than it was for him to deal with them.

So there Samuel and Eli both lay in near total darkness, Eli thinking of declining health and the disappointment of children. Both of them recalled the wounds of the day, those they inflicted, and those they received. As sleep escaped them, they worried about the things that were, and the things that were to come.  The darkness intensified both their regrets and their fears, and the voices that called to them in the night seemed anything but friendly.  Have you ever been haunted by nights like that?

What happened next is interesting, particularly when you keep in mind that Samuel’s name means “God is heard,” and the name Eli means, “my God.”  A voice called, “Samuel!  Samuel!” Samuel jumped up and ran into Eli’s room, answering, “Here I am!”  “Go back to sleep.  I didn’t call you,” Eli told him.  It happened again, and again.  I guess growing up in the church is no guarantee that you can recognize God’s voice. After the third time, the priest Eli figured out that it must be God, and so he told Samuel to respond the next time, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.”  And that is what happened the fourth time God called Samuel. God told Samuel that God’s promises of judgment and justice against Eli and his sons would be fulfilled, and that Samuel was to speak this truth to the priest.

The next morning, Eli called Samuel, and Samuel responded to Eli just as he had the night before, “Here I am.” Then Eli asked the young boy to do something that must have difficult, given their relationship. “Tell me, tell me what the Lord said to you. Don’t hide it from me,” Eli demanded.  Eli knew it couldn’t be good news, but maybe he was tired of listening to his own voice in the night, the one tormented with lies and regrets.  After all his years as a priest, he was finally willing to hear God’s truth.  Telling God’s truth to his priest and mentor was the turning point in Samuel’s life.  “God told me to tell you that your house will be punished for the sins of your sons,” he said.

Telling God’s truth isn’t always easy.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. knew that.  Tomorrow we commemorate Dr. King’s life, and give thanks for his hearing God’s call and his telling of God’s truth. He entered Morehouse College determined to become either a lawyer or a physician, but found that God had other things in mind. Dr. King said, “As I passed through the preparation stages of these two professions, I still felt within that undying urge to serve God and humanity through the ministry.  I came to see that God had placed a responsibility upon my shoulders, and the more I tried to escape it the more frustrated I would become.”[1] Like Samuel, and like Philip in our Gospel reading, King heard God say, “Follow me,” and then spent his life, in fact he gave his life, saying, “Come and see!”

King wanted to work with black youth, but God thrust him into the Civil Rights Movement.  God’s work through Dr. King resulted in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. His achievements continued past his untimely death.  He spoke with God’s spirit and promise for the future.  Even in darkest times, he proclaimed to African Americans, “Go ahead!  God can be trusted!”[2]

For King, God’s voice came in the form of an undying urge.  When he didn’t respond, it came louder, in the form of frustration.  Reading of King’s life, you will find that God’s call also came through mentors, friends and colleagues.  It came crying out through the need of the world.  There was God’s truth to be told.

The world still cries out in need, and God’s truth is still to be told.  God’s truth is that we, who are black and white, and tan and yellow, and cream colored, and every shade, we are all created in God’s image.  God’s truth is that we are to care for the widow and the orphan, the ones with no home, and those who cannot afford medical care.  God’s truth is also that we are all sinners, and that we are loved and forgiven even in the midst of our sin.  The truth is God sees us, as God saw Nathanial, sitting under the fig tree, —sees into our heart of hearts, and calls our name.  This is God’s truth.  We, who both listen and turn a deaf ear, we who are full of both doubt and certainty, we who are both terrified and fearless, are called to tell it.  We, who are both sinner and saint, who are both bleeding and bled for, are called to live this truth.

~Pastor Cheryl Ann Griffin

[1] Baldwin, Lewis.  There is a Balm in Gilead.  Minneapolis:  Augsburg Fortress, 1991, 279-280.

[2] Lischer, Richard.  The Preacher King.  New York:  Oxford University Press, 1995, 269.